Category: Cabaret

It’s been a busy year for Forest of Thoughts. After a fantastic White Night, it was on to Brighton Science Festival where our events included such delights as calorie-free cakes in balloons, dinosaur towel origami, the science of illusion and the ever-popular miracle berries (that turn your tastebuds upside-down making sour things taste sweet). Over 2,000 people have experienced the joys of the Forest of Thoughts so far – and if you haven’t already entered the Forest, now’s your chance…

We’ve been asked to take part in the Latitude Festival, with burlesque doll making out of vintage gloves and old tights (on Saturday night as part of the Alternative Village Fete.) And even more excitingly, we have a series of events planned at the Blind Tiger, the first of which are only a month away. By day it’s for kids, by night it all gets a little more adult. Tickets are now available from Eventbrite – our science festival shows all sold out so get your tickets now to avoid disappointment.

Grow your horizons and taste the fruits of wisdom in the Garden of Delights. Make seedbombs, plant seedlings and learn plant magic in the Sorcerer’s Shed, with Josie Jeffreys of http://www.seedfreedom.net (author of SeedBombs) Stitch butterflies and rosebuds, fold origami flowers, make wool bees and let your crafty side blossom in the Fairy Circle. Share a teddy bear’s picnic and make your own toys with Crafternoon. Meet the Gastrognome and learn fairyland cooking secrets, with magical food to confound your senses. With grow-your-own and foraging tips, local produce and magical surprises, see how you grow in the Garden of Delights.

Tickets £2 adults, £1 children (7+) plus pay as you play for selected activities. Children must be accompanied by an adult and supervised at all times. Buggy park available but space limited so avoid bringing buggies unless essential.

You’ve never known temptation like it until you step inside the Garden of Desires. Professor Elemental will take you by the hand and lead you through a multitude of sins. Lust over the twinkling stars of the burlesque and boylesque scene, including Coco De Ville, Mick Wunderlich and Luxury Values.Show off your vanity by dressing as your favourite deadly sin: display your sartorial elegance with pride and who knows, your dreams of avarice may be rewarded with a fabulous prize. Indulge your gluttony with a feast of the senses including experimental food, stage magic from Damian Jennings and close up magic from Leon Simmonds plus adult crafting with Charlie Bear. A spellbinding night full of fantastical surprises.

October 29th sees the return of White Night, an all-night free arts festival to mark the clocks going back, this year themed around Utopias. More than 70 separate events from the fanciful to the factual aim to inspire you to reach for perfection. As part of White Night, creative producers Home Live Art are curating The Alternative Village Fete, which runs from 6pm-1am at Old Steine Gardens.

Engaging the most exciting artists and creatives from the city and beyond, visitors to The Alternative Village Fete’s stage and stalls will encounter experiences that take them from deco tea rooms, swing dancing and vintage glamour makeovers to pop video routines, food flinging olympics, dark midnight rituals and everything in between.

The Forest of Thoughts will be offering doll and jewellery making workshops using reclaimed objects, from laddered stockings to vintage gloves that have lost their partner, fabric scraps to packs of cards. Bring along any of these plus broken jewellery to re-fashion it into something new; sentimental items that can be turned into brooches and rings; and any small items that you love but aren’t entirely sure what to do with.

Prepare to be entertained by Forest of Thoughts partners, Brighton Science Festival, building marble runs and spaghetti towers, and of course there will be the usual sprinkling of magic. Best of all, it’s free – all you need to pay for are the materials you use, all of which can be bought at pocket money prices.

The Alternative Village Fete is a fete re-imagined for the hours of darkness – expect ghouls, vamps (of both the blood favouring and 40s starlet variety), kitsch popstars, rocka-hillbillies, retro hepkats and kittens. Visitors to the Fete are invited to express their twilight alter egos by dressing fancy for the occasion. Come out and play!

At the Forest of Thoughts we’ve long been fans of The Ignobel Awards – indeed, we were fans before the Forest of Thoughts even existed (though the Ignobels certainly planted a few seeds). If you’re new to the awards, as a brief summary, they were created to reward scientific discoveries that, ‘First make you laugh, then make you think.’

Here’s a trailer for the awards:

And we’re very excited to report that we’ll be streaming the awards ceremony live at 12.30am GMT (if you’re elsewhere, see the world clock) on 29th September.

OK, it’s a bit of a late night but it’s well worth it. As a taster, last year’s Engineering Prize went to Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter; the Peace Prize went to Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain; and the Biology Prize went to Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats (and demonstrating it prolongs copulation time). Oh, and the prizes are presented by Nobel Prize Winners. This makes our inner geek go mushy.

Tickets to the event are sold out so the only way to see the show is to watch it online. So make a date and get watching! We hope you enjoy the Igs as much as we do.

NB: if you play the live stream before about 12.10am tomorrow, the video will appear to buffer indefinitely until the video stream goes live, so don’t waste your time trying to watch until then. You won’t get access to any exciting behind-the-scenes footage.

Robotic bells, Clara 2.0, the ‘polite robot thereminist’ and Edgar Alan Crow: to anyone who knows her – which is an impressively vast and thoroughly deserved fanbase – the words Sarah Angliss automatically follow. Part science, part art, all performance, Angliss’s robotic and hypnotic acts tempt you down meandering paths towards unexpected magical discoveries. While this may seem like hyperbole, her biography speaks for itself:

“My work has been seen at the Brighton Festival Fringe, Coin Street, Gasworks Gallery (Vauxhall), Cheltenham Music and Science Festivals, Final Cut, the Eden Project, Edinburgh International Science Festival, London Zoo, Placard Headphone Festival, The Roundhouse, South Bank Centre, Science Museum, Soho Theatre, Southwold Pier, Quake Dance Festival, Winchester Festival of Art and Mind and many other venues.

I’ve won a number of awards, include NESTA Dreamtime funding and public engagement grants from the Wellcome Trust. In 2007, my AV installation Repeat Repeat, in collaboration with performer Caroline Radcliffe, won a Quake Dance Festival Award. My collaborative performances in the Festival Fringe have twice been nominated as ‘stand-out’ shows of the Brighton Festival.”

And now she’s arranging the aftershow party for Brighton’s first Maker Faire which takes place at The Brunswick on 3rd September. In addition to performing her unique and mindblowing work, Angliss has put together an incredible line-up of fellow artists including Thomas Truax, Jane Bom-Bane, Nick Pynn and FoT favourites, Sawchestra (pictured above) who ran two amazing events for us at Playgroup.

At FoT, we love talented and quirky acts, particularly if there’s an element of magic to the performance. As far as I’m concerned, hula-hooping is magic. Yes, I know there’s a science to hula hooping but no matter how many lessons I have, such science eludes me and instead, I continue to prove that gravity does indeed exist, in the form of the hula hoop repeatedly thumping to the ground.

These wonderful performers are thus utterly magical to me. Enjoy.

And just to show we bring you the hottest new talent first, this amazing child prodigy. Yes, the get up is a little disturbing but just look at the pure joy in her smile…

I challenge anyone to meet Rufus Moonshine and not fall a little bit in love with him. He combines gentle charm with a viciously sharp mind, and has a brain full of obscure and fascinating facts. Talking to Rufus is like wandering through the backroom of a museum that hasn’t been touched for years and is hiding endless wonderful treasures. He’s uploaded the text for the talk he did in the Forest of Thoughts entitled Conan Doyle, Fan Fiction and the Severed Ear. Enjoy.

The wonderful Paul Zenon sprinkled his fairy dust over the Forest of Thoughts, amazing people with fantastic tricks. He’s now off in Edinburgh, and has used his magical powers to persuade Paul Daniels to do a chat show with him on Monday afternoon as a fundraiser for the Wonderbus (a wonderful charity that I strongly […]